The purpose of this research is to find the perception of teachers and students on the subject 「technology and home economics」 in the 7th national curriculum. This research will present some ideas and suggestions to teachers who teach the subject ...
The purpose of this research is to find the perception of teachers and students on the subject 「technology and home economics」 in the 7th national curriculum. This research will present some ideas and suggestions to teachers who teach the subject 「technology and home economics」 and also some ideas for a new curriculum, an 8th curriculum.
For this research, questionnaires were sent by post to not only teachers who teach technology and home economics to all graders in middle school and to first graders in high school but also middle school students and first graders in high school. Then they were collected. The number of collected teachers' questionnaires was 184 and out of them, 161 questionnaires were used for being analyzed. That of students' questionnaires was 1082 and 1065 questionnaires were used for being analyzed.
The collected questionnaires were technically analyzed by SPSS/WIN 10.0 program, which measured frequency, percentage, average, standard deviation. According to the types of data, some of collected questionnaires were analyzed by t-test, one-way ANOVA analyses, Duncan's test, cross tabulation analyses and correlation analyses.
The results of this research were summarized as follows.
1) There were two teaching types of technology and home economics: the partial charge and the whole charge according to teachers' majors, and both types occurred in similar percentage. The partial charge means that teachers majoring in technology teach
only the technology part and teachers majoring in home economics teach only the home
economics part when they teach the same subject, technology and home economics. These days the partial charge more often occurs in national or public schools than in private schools, and in coeducational schools than in girls' or boys' schools.
2) The major problems of teaching technology and home economics were caused in order by teachers' lack of skills and knowledge concerned which are not their own major, the lack of students' interests and teaching materials, and burden of tests.
3) Teachers' confidence in teaching the contents of the subject, technology and home economics, made a significant difference according to their majors. Teachers whose major was technology were more confident when they taught the chapters of the textbooks related to their major, technology, while teachers whose major was home economics were more confident when they
taught the chapters of the textbooks related to their major, home economics. According to implementation types, the partial charge gave the teachers higher confidence than the whole charge in teaching almost all the chapters of the textbook. In the matter of significant difference in teachers' confidence, the number of the chapters related to technology is larger than that of the chapters related to home economics. The first showed more significant difference in teachers' confidence than the second. It seemed that teachers whose major was technology had less burden than teachers whose major was home economics when they taught the chapters in which they didn't specialize.
4) According to implementation types, teachers' satisfaction was showed to be higher in the partial charge than in the whole charge.
5) Students' perception about the subject, technology and home economics, was affected by sex, grade, and implementation types. Girls' perception on the subject was more practical than boys'. Students in the 9th grade showed lower interests, importance, practicality on the subject than those in the other grades. According to implementation types, students in the 7th grade showed more interests in the partial charge than in the whole charge.
6) Considering correlation among interest, importance, practicality and difficulty, they thought of practical things as important and when they were interested in some things, they thought them important. They got interested in what they thought important and practical. And the more difficult the subject was, the less interested they were in it.
As a result of these analyses, the partial charge gave teachers higher confidence than the whole charge in teaching almost all the chapters of the textbook and also, according to implementation types, it made teachers more satisfied than the whole charge. Students in the 9th grade showed lower interests in the subject and thought the subject less important and practical than those in the other grades. Therefore it is necessary to study 「technology and home economics」implementations in the 9th grade. Also, the students' perception toward technology and home economics contents showed significant difference according to sex, so teachers in coeducational schools have to consider more efficient methods of teaching the subject.